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Phone Apps Aim to Fight Harassment

It was almost a year ago that a subway ride turned Violet Kittappa into an activist.

She was on a crowded Queens-bound W train when she noticed a middle-aged man inching toward her. She tried to concentrate on her book and ignore him, when she felt a nudge on her leg. The man was breathing heavily, and his face was contorted. When she looked down, she realized that he was rubbing against her.

“This is when I flip out,” Ms. Kittappa wrote shortly afterward on ihollaback.org, a Web site that encourages women to post their accounts of harassment and abuse as part of a campaign to end practices that are seldom discussed but that many women say are pervasive.

As a movement, it seems to be gaining traction. The City Council’s Committee on Women’s Issues held its first hearing on street harassment last month. At the same time, technology has enabled women to document what previous generations could not. They can now take photographs of the men who accosted them and publicize the pictures, which allows women to assist the police or embarrass those who have harassed them.

Now Hollaback — which in this case refers to the act of responding to harassment on the Web — is expanding its service to mobile devices. This week, the group is releasing an iPhone application that allows users to report harassment in seconds. The data is automatically mapped, and a follow-up e-mail from Hollaback asks for a more detailed account of what happened.

Interactive technology is particularly apt for documenting and combating street harassment, said Emily May, the executive director of Hollaback. The more people use the application, the more valuable the database becomes, she said. The group hopes to eventually share its information with the authorities and use it to identify “hot spots” and catch offenders.

“Street harassment teaches us to be silent,” Ms. May said. “It teaches us to walk on. That is the very last thing we want to be teaching women and girls.”

The iPhone application, which cost about $15,000 to develop, was financed largely through online donations of $10 or less and built by OrangeMico, a Brooklyn technology firm. An Android application, which will follow, was created pro bono by Jill P. Dimond, a doctoral candidate at Georgia Tech who is researching domestic violence and technology. The applications costs 99 cents.

Ms. May founded the group with friends five years ago and became its only paid staff member earlier this year, coordinating 20 volunteers out of an office in her home in Brooklyn. The organization now has chapters in six American cities, along with others in Britain, Canada and Australia.

“The Internet speeds everything up,” Ms. May said. “If we as activists can’t get the Internet to speed up social change, then we’re not doing our jobs.”

A parallel, and more traditional, effort is also under way. At the City Council hearing, activists called for a study examining street harassment, an advertising campaign and the establishment of “harassment-free zones” around schools. The committee chairwoman, Julissa Ferreras, a Democrat from Queens, has pledged to pursue all three.

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Ms. Ferreras called the hearing after visiting a high school in Elmhurst, Queens, where instead of requesting computers or supplies, female students asked her to stop the mechanics in a nearby garage from making inappropriate comments directed at them.

Their stories hit close to home for the councilwoman, who grew up in the district and still remembers the “speed walk” to and from school, when she would try to avoid a group of men who stood outside one particular bodega.

“You tense up, you try not to make eye contact, walk by as fast as you can,” she said.

It is still an almost daily occurrence, Ms. Ferreras said, adding that she was even harassed on her way to the hearing.

Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said that following or threatening a woman would constitute a criminal offense.

“Certainly the unwanted sexual touching associated with groping is a crime, and we urge any victim to come forward with a description of the suspect,” he said. “If she feels she can safely capture his image with a cellphone camera, all the better.”

Mr. Browne added that the department had a program involving the transit bureau and the Special Victims Division to address harassment and forms of sexual abuse in the subways. (Last November, the Council also had a hearing on that subject.)

Yet it is sometimes unclear when the line between free speech and harassment has been crossed, and that makes some women hesitant to come forward, said Ms. Kittappa, who now volunteers for Hollaback. She said she went to the police last year and picked the man who accosted her from photographs of known sex offenders, but he remained at large.

Ms. May and others say the problem will not be solved solely by the police. What is required is a shift in the culture that sometimes tolerates such behavior.

“Women don’t put up with harassment in the workplace or the home,” Ms. May said. “Why are they still putting up with it on the street?”

A version of this article appears in print on November 8, 2010, on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Helping Women Fight Back Against Street Harassment, Seconds After It Occurs. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe